Rice says time now to establish Palestinian state

October 17, 2007

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has decided to forego the double-speak of diplomacy in advancing the Bush administration's two-state solution in the Middle East. In a strongly worded pronouncement from the West Bank city of Ramallah, Rice emphatically asserted that the time has come for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Actually, that time came and went during each of the previous three administrations, going back to at least the presidency of Jimmy Carter. But hammering out a lasting peace between Israel and its multiple adversaries in the region is like brokering a mutual nonaggression pact between cats and dogs: It might look good on paper but the fur is still going to fly after the signing ceremony. Rice is pushing for a joint statement from the Israeli government and Palestinian leadership on key principles of engagement before they meet with President Bush in Annapolis, Md., later this fall. The purpose of this conference is to identify specific areas of agreement between the two sides and restart the peace process. If this sounds like a familiar pattern, that's because it is - and the results have seldom lived up to the hype. The difference this time, however, is that President Bush only has 15 months left in office and the window of opportunity to affect a change in Israeli/Palestinian relations is narrowing to a veritable sliver. This explains the suddenly harder edge adopted by Rice, since no major foreign policy initiative can be achieved by this lame-duck president once the 2008 election cycle shifts into overdrive. The real test will be whether Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can be made to see the need for a definitive statement of wide-ranging agreement issued by the two sides in advance of the Annapolis conference. Olmert, to this point, has favored the sort of vague document that commits his government to nothing more than being willing to talk; his counterpart, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, has insisted that without a specific roadmap for negotiations there is no reason to even hold such a summit. For her part, Rice intends to visit other Arab states in the region to build support for both the conference and the inclusion of “final status issues” in the joint statement she is pressing Israel to sign. The ball would now seem to be in Olmert's court, and we would hope that he recognizes the value in being part of a two-state solution to this intractable problem. That doesn't mean these latest negotiations will produce a diplomatic breakthrough, but it does mean they should be given a chance to work.